Taiwan-headquartered Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics manufacturer, will launch up to 10,000 consumer electronics retail stores in China, says China Daily. Until now they have not had a significant retail brand or presence.
What will they sell? Probably some of the many products that they build for well known brands, including the iPhone, iPod, iMac, Sony Playstation, Sony Vaio notebooks, Amazon Kindle, Nokia phones and Nintendo Wii.
But part of the plan, we’ve heard from an independent source, will be to use the retail presence in China to win manufacturing business as well. HP, Dell and others can move more of their business to Foxconn, along with a promise to get retail presence for their electronics in the Foxconn stores in China.
Foxconn exports $55.6 billion of electronics from their factories in China, says the article, or about 3.9% of China’s total exports. And that number may be lowballed. Our sources say no one outside of Foxconn even knows the real size of their exports, and that $100 billion/year or more is the street rumor in Asia.
Get em to build the CrunchPad. Don’t give up man!!
dude stfu, noone wants to build it.
Ouch. “Sorry Apple, we don’t need you anymore, we’ll sell our own i…Phone”.
dude, you are seem very disappointed by Apple.
When i saw the foxconn img my first thought was that they’re gonna take over the crunchpad project.
wishful thinking.
Mike, you should’ve dealt with the Taiwanese re: CrunchPad from the outset. They wouldn’t screw you over.
Shoulda, coulda.
Went to school with a higher-up at Acer, and he told me the people in charge of Taiwanese tech scene are all Princeton, Stanford, UC Berkley types — totally upright and forward thinking.
You’ve been to Taiwan, I don’t have to tell you how that is.
just got back from Taiwan. i was riding to the airport with my gal’s family and asked them what they thought about competing with china. they said, ‘can’t do it, they’re too big.’ truthfully, i don’t even know if the average taiwanese understands how big some of their own companies are in china. they practically run the entire private healthcare network in china.
this looks like a risky but potentially brilliant move by foxconn. GO TAIWAN!
Mike, you should have gone to the Taiwanese OEM and design house first, before working with FG. I’ve several friends work for Foxconn and Foxconn treated them like slaves and I feel the whole Taiwanses hardware manufacturers are all slaves to US companies. It’s sad for me because I am from there but it’s also very true.
smart move
This is an interesting move. I suppose only a giant like Foxconn could undertake this.
Although I could see strange ripple effects if they became too powerful.
I wonder how the the market leader Gome will counter them?
Interesting strategy, I can see where they are going. Tackling the emerging (rising) middle class in Asia.
Foxconn and HTC and others are all manufactueres, all the brands you know about (HP, Lenovo, Dell, …) have either joint ventures or are ‘just’ contracting them ‘to build’. Now Foxconn has to grow like anyone else with share and stakeholders (fiduciary responsibility)? How?
More price competition with others for the same job?
Creating a new market? For this they don’t have the people (innovation etcetera).
Going into the physical space, aka retailer. Being on the on end the manufacturer to the other end, the retailer. Sony, Lenovo & Co now outsourcing its retail. That can get interesting.
The trend of specialization we are seeing, creeping in over the time EVERYWHERE, is amazing.
Support centers, procurement, online retail, physical retail. The big blue chips (Fortune500) shedding less profitable areas, sourcing out, focusing on core competencies, and creating strong partnerships to remain important on a global scale. That is the signature of Glottalization.
Addition to that, because of these partnerships. Collaboration places, communication, fast (instant) will grow of importance. This is where the corporate internet space will grow steadily. Google Wave will have its userbase. The venture of the Facebook co-founder who started to build a corporate collab software (in the news last week), he has his reasons why to start something like that.
I see a parallel here between Infosys and other software giants of India and this. During its initial years, Infosys did little on their own and depended on third parties and middle-men to get them software business. Once they reached critical mass, they eliminated the middle-men and went direct with Fortune-500. I see Foxconn doing the same, ultimately, creating their own brands and selling direct. Over the long run, US may be hurt through the rise of these companies in services and manufacturing taking more direct roles.
Very interesting move for Foxconn. Why am I not surprised?